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regexrcsvline-breaks

Remove line breaks, paragraph breaks in csv file using R

I have a csv file that contains some line breaks or paragraph breaks . How I know this is , when I open open this csv file in a word document I see the pilcrow symbol ¶, after the paragraph and before the beginning of the new paragraph. How do strip these line breaks from this csv file in R ? Any help is much appreciated.

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PAST MEDICAL HISTORY

  1. Persistent atrial fibrillation with atrial flutter, status-post atrial flutter ablation line in October of 2002.
  2. Tachy/brady syndrome.
  3. Insulin-dependent diabetes. Has been diabetic for approximately 35 years.
  4. Hypertension, well
Solution

  • Here is an test case. You just want to remove empty lines. This is the file test.txt (complete with misspellings): (Note: your example is clearly not a csv file.)

    some header text

more text
 even omre text

    ------------------

     txt= readLines("test.txt")
 newtext <- txt[nchar(txt)>0]
 newtext
#[1] "some header text" "more text"        " even omre text"

    To remove numbered lines (ones that begin with digits followed by a period) one would post process that result with sub():

     txt <- "PAST MEDICAL HISTORY

 1. Persistent atrial fibrillation with atrial flutter, status-post atrial flutter ablation line in October of 2002.
 2. Tachy/brady syndrome.
 3. Insulin-dependent diabetes.  Has been diabetic for approximately 35 years.  
 4. Hypertension, well"


 newtxt= readLines(textConnection(txt))
 sub("^[[:digit:].]+", "", newtxt)
#------------------------
[1] "PAST MEDICAL HISTORY"                                                                                             
[2] ""                                                                                                                 
[3] " Persistent atrial fibrillation with atrial flutter, status-post atrial flutter ablation line in October of 2002."
[4] " Tachy/brady syndrome."                                                                                           
[5] " Insulin-dependent diabetes.  Has been diabetic for approximately 35 years.  "                                    
[6] " Hypertension, well"     

    > sub("^[[:digit:].]+", "", newtxt[nchar(newtxt)>0])
[1] "PAST MEDICAL HISTORY"                                                                                             
[2] " Persistent atrial fibrillation with atrial flutter, status-post atrial flutter ablation line in October of 2002."
[3] " Tachy/brady syndrome."                                                                                           
[4] " Insulin-dependent diabetes.  Has been diabetic for approximately 35 years.  "                                    
[5] " Hypertension, well"